Aussie 3G quietly climbs to 46%

 

Not yet being quoted by Mediasmart in media sales material, Telstra 3G penetration was placed at 54% in March by CEO Sol Trujillo. A quick scan around the other carriers indicates no change in their reported 3G numbers making a reported total at 46%, almost 10% higher than the government stats of 8.55M or around 37%.

Why is this important to marketers?
Our belief is that mobile is still largely a missed opportunity for marketers. In a market that's moving so quickly it's hard to get a good bead on the reality of course, that's why tracking like this helps. Still there remains a lot of very smart clients and agency folk who think that mobile is still too nascent.

Yet at the base level we continually see ad performance that is ten times better than web. In a market becoming more obsessed than ever with ROI that's got to be attractive right?

Mobile activation from traditional advertising is really taking off with consumers responding to ads "in the moment". Who still seriously believes that someone seeing an out of home ad will write down the url and remember to visit a web site? This is extreme inertia working against the advertiser and mobile helps to solves this.

An extension of this, QR codes, the latest so-called bleeding edge mobile technology is damned by naysayers as a "wait 2 years and see" tactic. The fact is that (with correct implementation) QR codes are CONSISTENTLY OUTPERFORMING other response channels sometimes by a large factor - we hope to share some data on this soon.

The fact is that our customers are still way ahead of the marketing industry in mobile. Some marketers  are working hard to close this gap.

Where do you stand?

Comments

[Ben Shepherd]

once the infrastructure is in place things will improve

- standards around ad serving
- standards around ad sizes
- benchmarks
- standards around site dev/capabilities etc
- more thought around pricing (not just taking old internet models and cpms and not being able to rationalise the costs)
- third party measurement
- solid research into $$ spend on mobile working harder/smarter than $$ spend on other channels

a few simple things could be done that would turn mobile from a bit of a battle into a great opportunity.

[Simon Morgan]

Hi Ben, on pricing and rationalising costs - totally agree - fact is there are some wildly different views on what mobile inventory is worth. Optus for example pricing at $60CPM, much more than twice the market - put this against a backdrop of crashing CPMs of low single $s online.

Yet mobile is performing very well - our ave CTR 1.5% - and that fact alone, despite being talked about a lot is not driving advertisers to the medium (agree here too - more data needed).

My current net: It's a big, complicated and difficult to navigate ecosystem - our job is to make it easier to access...and that just isn't easy! In part its why we developed Mgage, http://bit.ly/c1IEH a small step in simplifying things.

Continually striving to address the points you raise is key. I'd also like to see more clients and agencies taking a leap and trialling the channel - most who do end-up committing more fully.

Cheers, Simon.